There appears to be some confusion. I am here to help. Why is Infinex doing weird stuff and not all the stuff you want it to do, like integrating your favourite AI-powered pizza delivery blockchain robot network? That is a good question; let’s dive in.
I have been thinking about how to conceptualise the various phases of Infinex so far and the ones that are rapidly approaching. What we have are Seasons. Season Zero was pre-launch, during which so many weird, wonderful, and horrible things occurred. But we emerged from Season Zero into Season One in early May. Season One is “Launch Season”. This is where we establish Infinex as the safest and easiest way to get onchain (no matter what chain you want to get onto 🤔). The key outcomes we want out of Season One are establishing our user base and getting deposits into the platform. We also need to finalise governance, which means we need the Patron NFT to replace our existing governance frameworks. But let’s be real, if Discord is any indication, you mainly seem to be excited about Season Two, “Integration Season”. This is where the real fun starts, and we begin to roll out amazing UX on top of your favourite protocols. We must progress through each of these Seasons deliberately to establish a foundation on which to grow. The rest of the post goes into more detail about each Season and what you can expect.
Infinex spent almost twelve months in semi-stealth mode. There were a few false starts, and we went down many dead ends, but by March 2024, we had finalised the architecture for our launch. During those twelve months, we invested heavily in decentralised governance. While it is arguable whether a multi-chain wallet needs governance at all, Infinex could have been a private company (metamask has done well with this stance for many years). I believe community alignment is one of the killer apps for crypto. Community alignment is a superpower. Without governance, a community can't control the direction of a project. But governance is not enough; you also need incentive alignment.
This is why I love mechanism design. Identifying and developing incentive structures to align a globally distributed group of people is challenging and energising. Once we realised Infinex had the potential to replace all of CeFi with a modern UX that connected all onchain protocols, it was clear we needed to design a set of incentive structures to onboard and delight a very cynical crypto audience. Infinex is built for the next billion users, but in the meantime, we need to convince the onchain degens to try Infinex. Then we can encourage users on centralised exchanges to migrate onchain.
After our governance points campaign, we had a waitlist of over 200k accounts. We needed an incentive structure to sort the waitlist because the first few protocols we integrate will likely have limited capacity. We wanted to ensure everyone who was onboarded had the best possible experience, even if that meant waiting. We took notes from the onboarding process of web2 companies like Superhuman, which had a huge waiting list for years due to their insistence on manually onboarding new users.
Once we identified this need, it became clear that user deposits were the simplest way to sort the waitlist. After all, users willing to deposit assets are likely to be the most engaged and drive the most activity. This was the genesis for our first campaign, Speedrun the Waitlist, which wraps up in a few days. It has been extremely successful with $100m+ deposited, and this was achieved with only two stablecoins supported (USDC/USDe). TVL is critical for onchain projects because it signals users trust the platform to secure their assets. But we had one more condition to satisfy: wrapping up our points program launched last year at the beginning of the points mania. We were not really sure how to wind this up, but it became increasingly obvious that the community was tiring of indefinite points games, especially when the points were getting increasingly diluted.
Thus emerged the Patron NFT. This was designed to replace the various voting mechanisms that had been implemented over the previous year. Why Patron, though? I think of a patron of the arts. Patronage is support or financial aid bestowed on another. This started as an inside joke because when we launched the project, I was intent that we had sufficient funding to be able to throw money at problems, so I donated $25m to the treasury. I believed the bear market was ending, and having missed most of it, we were significantly behind. I intended for us to be able to blitz scale using these funds, and we did that, including acquiring several teams. There were unintended consequences, though, including attempting to solve every problem in existence by designing a "perfect system" without iterative building. But while we undoubtedly wasted money in places, we also achieved a lot in a very short amount of time. During this early phase, many people asked me what I had gotten for my money, and I jokingly said nothing. As I thought more about this, I realised that this was the startup equivalent of patronage. A person with too much money providing resources to support a project with no clear upside. As OpenAI puts it, “It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Infinex in the spirit of a donation.”
Hence, the Patron NFT was born.
But how does all of this tie together? If you have been asking, you are not alone. Rest assured, there is a common thread across all of these campaigns.
I have been thinking about the incentives in early-stage capital formation a lot lately. And I am not the only one; Cobie has also been trying to solve this problem (with Echo.xyz). What many people agree with, though, is there is a problem to be solved. The status quo is broken. The community must control and govern a project to maximise alignment, this is impossible in the current state because by the time the majority of the community can access governance it is far too expensive to justify engaging.
So, we need to ensure the community governs and that the community can hold a meaningful percentage of the governance power in a project. Tossing the community a pittance in the form of an airdrop that, in totality, represents less governance power than the average seed investor is simply not sufficient. There is only one solution to this: sell governance power early and sell a lot of it. This really only works if you have already decentralised governance, which was where governance points came in. Because selling governance power cheaply without the community influencing the process is illegitimate. Here is the problem: there is a finite amount of governance power to go around, and if it is too cheap, you will end up with a race condition or gas war. This is another reason to sell it early in the lifecycle of the project, if you wait too long there will be too much demand.
So we need a form of governance, Patrons NFTs, and we need to distribute them. Speedrun dealt with the airdrop component, but there is a far harder challenge to solve: ensuring active users can buy Patrons and that everyone pays the same price. There will likely be excess demand in the current Patron Sale structure since there are ~20k (20% of the supply) Patrons available in the public mint. While this is far better than most projects, with the average for 2024 currently sitting at checks notes ZERO, it will still result in more demand than supply at the proposed price tiers.
This is where Craterun comes in. Craterun allows anyone to farm access to the Patron NFT. It distributes 5m $CRATE to users who deposit into their Infinex account. While many prizes can be won, the key ones are:
Patron NFTs - 1,000
Patron Passes - 5,000
Patron Tickets - 200,000
Each of these serves as a mechanism for ensuring a fair distribution of Patron NFTs. Without a gating mechanism, demand would likely be too high at the prices offered in the Patron Mint. Patron NFTs are free Patrons, with no purchase required. Patron Passes each guarantee a mint of a Patron NFT. Patron Tickets will gate access to the main Patron Sale, with a mechanism still under development.
Craterun asks users to deposit assets into their Infinex account, this time with a much wider range of assets expected (the full list is still pending). Speedrunners will also get bonuses for keeping assets in the platform. This should increase the total assets deposited and confidence in Infinex. However, it will also ensure that only engaged users can access the Patron Mint, likely occurring right after Craterun ends. We may even run some Memecoin Wars where different memecoins compete for deposit value and win bonuses ahead of Craterun.
However, there is another component to Craterun: it would have been easy to design a simple linear farming mechanism to allow whales to farm most of the mint passes. This would have also defeated the purpose of wide distribution. This is why Craterun introduces randomness. Introducing randomness makes the process less linear, as many small accounts will end up opening mint passes in crates. There is a delicate balance in distribution mechanics; pure linear often alienates small users who feel it is impossible to earn enough governance power to matter. However, non-linear distributions are FUBAR as Sybils wage war against each other and the project, usually at the expense of regular users. Randomness can't be sybilled, though, giving smaller users a chance to get access even if their asset base is small.
Beyond this, Craterun is an opportunity to really flex the UX difference between Infinex and other projects. I love Friend.tech and Fantasy.top, but it goes without saying that both interfaces have significant challenges and don't even get me started on World. All of these projects use amazing mechanism design, but it is incredibly hard to design secure smart contracts and world-class UX. Infinex acquired a team of world-class UX designers and engineers last year, and this will be our first chance to showcase how much time and effort we have put into UX. The current onboarding flow is, of course, impressive, but Craterun is going to take this to the next level.
So, with these three sequential campaigns, we satisfy all of the conditions.
Create an ordered list of users for integration rollouts
Gracefully exit the points meta dumpster fire
Decentralize governance
Ensure fair governance distribution
Incentivise deposits into the platform
engagement farm memecoin communities
Show off the world-class Infinex UX
Align the entire community around the Infinex vision
First, Speedrun incentivises the initial user base to deposit assets into their accounts and to create a list of users for future integration rollouts. Then, Craterun will distribute access to the Patron NFT and incentivise more assets to be deposited and more users to create accounts. Finally, the Patron Mint ensures fair access to governance for the entire crypto community, aligning everyone on the Infinex vision of uniting all chains and protocols under a single UX layer.
Once this is done, we will begin rolling out our first wave of integrations; Season Two will begin.
This post intended to contextualise the various Infinex campaigns and where they fit into the project's longer-term vision. I’m also working on a post to provide greater detail about that vision. This follow-up post will focus on Season Two.
Until then, happy Crate farming.